Mesopotamian kings obtained copper from there as well. Enmetena probably acquired this stone from what is now Oman, ancient Magan, about eight hundred miles to the south of his kingdom. Diorite was not found near Lagash, or anywhere else in Mesopotamia. It is one of the earliest free-standing statues of a king and it was carved out of diorite, a hard black stone. The statue is of Enmetena (also written Entemena), a king who ruled the city-state of Lagash in what is now southern Iraq, two thousand years before the classical age of the Greeks. Appropriately enough, the man who commissioned it, 4,400 years ago, was himself a diplomat who cared about international relations and who helped create the idea of alliances between states. It had been looted from a museum in Baghdad in 2003, returned to the Iraqi ambassador in 2006, and it has now been delivered home. Among them was a stone statue of a Mesopotamian king, thirty inches tall, three hundred pounds and missing its head. On Tuesday, September 7, the United States returned to Iraq hundreds of historic objects that had found their way over here during the past decade.
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